In late October, Colin Powell issued a ringing endorsement of Barack Obama. He said:

"When [Obama] took over, the country was in very, very difficult straits. We were in the one of the worst recessions we had seen in recent times, close to a depression. The fiscal system was collapsing. Wall Street was in chaos, we had 800,000 jobs lost in that first month of the Obama administration and unemployment peaked a few months later at 10 percent. So we were in real trouble. The auto industry was collapsing, the housing was start[ing] to collapse, and we were in very difficult straits. And I saw over the next several years, stabilization come back in the financial community. Housing is now starting to pick up after four years—it's starting to pick up. Consumer confidence is rising."

Powell also said he does not trust Mitt Romney on matters of foreign policy. Even those within Romney’s own party have begun to abandon his radical, equivocating candidacy.